LANDOWNERS’ CALL FOR “PACIFYING” THE COUNTRYSIDE

Written:Written on April 28 (May 11), 1913Published:Published on May 4, 1913 inPravdaNo. 101.

      Printed from thePravdatext.

      Signed:M.P..Source:Lenin
	  Collected Works,

      Progress Publishers,1971,

      Moscow,Volume 36,

      pages232-233.Translated:Andrew RothsteinTranscription\Markup:R. CymbalaPublic Domain:Lenin Internet Archive.You may freely copy, distribute,
	display and perform this work, as well as make derivative and
	commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet
	Archive” as your source.•README

Ifthe newspaperNovoye Vremyais quite deservedly
“famed” for being one of the most dishonest newspapers,
which adapts itself to profitable business interests, to the
government, and to the ruling class of landowners, its
correspondent Menshikov is doubly famed, and with even
better reason.

Menshikov’sarticles frequently allow readers to make
a sure guess as to which “circles” in official, capitalist,
or aristocratic St. Petersburg hadorderedthis or that
statement by him. Not very long ago, this Menshikov was
ordered an article in defence of the “aristocratic” Council
of State against the plans for its supposedly democratic
reform. The article had clearly been ordered by
high-ranking official landowner circles. All the more instructive
is it then to hear what the landowners have to say about
the notorious “pacification” of the countryside.

“Ihave fairly frequent calls from provincials visiting
St. Petersburg, landowners and public men,” says
Menshikov. Whether the landowners call on him, or whether he
calls at the front halls of distinguished landowners, is
another matter. In any case he sings to the landowners’
tune, and his article has value only in that it gives one an
idea of what the landowners frankly say.

“Ifthey are to be believed—and why shouldn’t they
be believed,” the landowners’ mouthpiece goes on, “the
Pugachov
movement[1]of 1905–06 has not at all ended.
It has subsided, it has assumed other, less boisterous forms,
but it continues its work of destruction. True, the peasants
no longer march, as they used to do, in great crowds, with
caravans of horse-drawn carts, to plunder and burn the
country estates of the landowners. But arson continues all thesame without cease: now it’s a house they set on fire, now
a threshing shed, now a hayloft, now a barn, now a stack
of corn or straw. The most outrageous, the most stupid
illegal cattle-grazing continues.... During the seven years
of our parliamentary era, no headway at all has been made
in the fight against village anarchy.”

Thuswrites Menshikov inNovoye Vremya. The order
evidently was to prepare “public opinion” for fresh
measures of persecution and punishment of “hooligans”, to use
the expression current in the Black-Hundred and Octobrist
camp. But, in carrying out his orders, the landowners’
lackey blurts out the landowners’ true state of mind and
the true causes of their alarm.

Letus note and remember that the landowning gentry
intend to have new punitive laws and regulations to fight
the “Pugachov movement”of1905–06,which has not at all
ended, but has assumed new forms.

Onlyone thing is somewhat strange. In 1905 and 1906,
the government and the Council of the United
Nobility[2]assured themselves and others that the “Pugachov
movement” was the result of communal landownership and
the embryonic state of the institution of private property
in land among the peasantry. Now all the agents of the
government, all the government parties and newspapers
are dinning into our ears that the village commune has
collapsed and has been destroyed, and that the new system
of land tenure and the establishment of private property
in land among the peasantry have been a “tremendous”
success. If that were so, the “Pugachov movement”
allegedly caused by the village commune should surely have
stopped! And if it “has not at all ended”, as the landowners
assure us through Menshikov, their mouthpiece, it follows
that the village commune has nothing to do with it.
Consequently, the famous successes of the “new system of
land tenure” are a myth.

Atany rate, the policy of which the landowners have
been boasting is a patent flop.

[1]YemelyanPugachov—the leader of the peasant war of 1773–
75.

[2]TheCouncil of the United Nobility—a counter-revolutionary
landowners’ organisation which had a great influence on the tsarist
government’s policy; formed in May 1906, under the chairmanship
of the big landowner, Count A. A. Bobrinsky. During the Third
Duma period, a considerable number of its members were on the
Council of Stale and within the leadership of reactionary
organisations.